Explore "Dick's Desertion" by Marjorie Pickthall on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
A few weeks had passed, and sugar-making time had gone for that year -- gone in a sudden burst of life-giving warmth and moisture, in a tumult of tentative bird songs, in a broidery of earliest green things which heralded the swift, brief, infinitely caressing spring of the north. Gone also was peace and happiness from Stephanie's heart, and the kindly Collinsons grieved with her. For no sooner was the sugar-making over than Dick disappeared, leaving no word or trace behind. And with him disappeared Peter Many-Names.
They had looked daily for his return. But as the sweet keen weather grew more golden to the spring, as the shiny bud-cases burst, and the leaves showed in delicate wrinkled greens and reds, as the birds came back in coveys and battalions, fluttering and piping through the sunny wonderland of the woods, and still neither Dick nor his dark-faced tempter reappeared, Stephanie lost hope, and even cheery Mr. Collinson could give her little comfort in this strait. "He's sure to come back, my dear," he said to her often, "stout and wiry and very penitent; some day soon when we least expect it. He's got tired of civilisation and has gone off picnicking in the forest with Peter for a while, the young rascal. Don't you worry, lassie, he 'll come back."